


The Other Side of Silence

by SAYS



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-28 01:55:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15038141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SAYS/pseuds/SAYS
Summary: For Chelsea-- Twelve years in Azkaban, guilt raging through his shattering mind, Sirius Black can only keep one thing. Not his innocence. Not his sanity. Only a story. ***Written for SAYS Facebook Fic Exchange***





	The Other Side of Silence

**Author's Note:**

> This may not be exactly what you wished for, Chelsea, but the style might bring back happy memories of reading and writing dark, experimental one-shots. It's hard to believe that it's been twelve years since we met on HPFF, and in honour of those days - and a much happier twelve years than Sirius had! - please enjoy this regrettably short story.

When night falls—and yes, you are sure of this, that night is a thing and this is that thing—you tell yourself the story again. 

The story is all you have.

You mutter the words between the stones of your cell, between the walls and the sea that rages ceaselessly far below. Let it find freedom, let the very salt of the ocean know that you did not cause their deaths. 

And yet. 

You drop your forehead to the floor. 

And yet you killed them all the same. 

The voices remind you of your guilt. They swoop past you, claws barred, whispering—yes, whispering, for those are worse than screams. The screams are for you prisoners, you guilty ones who must remain until the last drop of life is squeezed from your wizened, crackled skin. The voices whisper poison into the cracks in your mind, your heart. And what power do you have to ignore them? There is your mother’s voice, resounding with each passing storm. You betrayed us; you betrayed them too. There is every teacher, every enemy, every disappointed friend. You traitor. You deserve this, every minute, every agony, every memory turned to ash.

At first, you deluded yourself, believed that you could survive, that your innocence would protect you. But the Dementors can’t—won’t—discriminate. You catch sight of yourself, from time to time, in your bucket of water, and you see only a blur. A person-thing that once said “I” and called itself by a name, that lived and felt and revelled in the sensation of it. That sensation returns as a half-forgotten flavour, a touch of hand against fur, a voice that lifts the last fragments of your soul. 

You’re in there somewhere still, locked in rooms within rooms in a stone plinth in the sea. You can’t swim; you can’t reach it, but you know with a desperate certainty that you’re there inside. Whole. Real. Exactly as you were before.

Even if you can’t remember quite what that was.

There are shapes where there were faces. Colours where there were details, times, places, those which cement objects to meanings. You hear the voices, but know no names. 

Who are you? 

A thing, wrapped in darkness. A prisoner down to his last dregs of soul.

Who were you? 

The answer—there must be an answer. You reach and reach until your fingers crunch against stone. 

The walls crush you from the inside out. 

 

_Once there was a boy_ —a flicker of torch-light on spectacles— _and he saved you._

 

You stopped marking the passage of time long ago, but there are things that evolve, devolve. Greasy, matted hair hangs over your eyes. Your hands are gnarled, with blue veins throbbing through translucent flesh. Outside—yes, there is an outside, a space beyond the entrance—the screams alter their pitch, grow hoarse. And ever—ever—the drip, drip, drip of damp walls, damp ceiling, a pool of fetid water shows only a reflection of endless shadow.

The story too has changed. You only just notice how your words decrease, then simplify. Your sentences are hardly worth the name. You sit there for hours, days, digging for the right words, the better words you used to know. They come to you from further and further away. They used to be right there—you jab yourself above the left eye—and there used to be so many, so witty and full of fire. You burned through school parchments with the fervour of a madman. You dripped words from a drink-sweetened tongue. You shot words across duelling spells and battlefields as though you had an endless supply.

The Dementors have them now. 

You clutch at your pounding forehead. One day, they will take the last. One day, you will lose even the story.

Your eyes blur. Blackened tears drip from your chin. 

One day, the Dementor will take the story. And you will kill them again. 

 

_Once there were four boys who feared nothing. Together, they were everything._

 

Apart. A part. 

You get lost in the space between. 

The steady drip, drip, drip of water raises you hackles. Ocean waves pound against the outer walls, sending tremors through the foundations, rattling the loose stone chips at your feet. The little pile drifts from corner to corner at your whim—not your will, you choose only for fancy. Logic is the first to shatter here—and from time to time you slide the rough edges against the pad of your thumb, searching for the right one. 

In the absence of words, you carve their faces in to the wall by the door, the driest, the cleanest, the one no one ever sees but you. Glasses and a crooked grin. Long and drawn, the eyes wistful, yearning. One sprouts antlers, hoofs, a stag’s body bounding through the woods. The other stares up at the moon, but you stubbornly keep him human. That’s all you can do now to repay, to repent.

You left him to face the emptiness alone. 

The breath doesn’t reach your lungs. It catches against tightness, a strangling hand that’s reached right in, through skin and bone and sinew. It brushes against a heart that forgets its rhythm, that shudders and shudders again. 

When the Dementor comes forward, you launch toward the void. Anything. Anything. If only to shatter the rest, to squeeze out the last and let him fall, a dried husk. You can’t— You just can’t—

The light fades and you crumble.

 

_Once there was death. They stared at you, unseeing. Their mouths open, unspeaking. There was only the tiny form, wriggling beneath the shards of plaster, that stifled your howls. It laughed when it—he—saw you. This was a game, still, to him. An elaborate hide-and-seek. In his unformed mind, they would rise again with smiles and love. And you—_

 

You wake. Alive. 

Not nearly hollow enough. There’s too much pain, too much muchness. You clench your hair until your scalp burns more fiercely than the inside of your skull. One eye slides out of focus and remains adrift, doubling every stone, every crevasse. Those stones are on your head, a relentless pressure on fragile brain matter. It thrusts any lingering words away. You cannot produce. You cannot think. You are in that you exist as a physical—or nearly so—thing, but you are nothing in that existence. 

Scrambling forward on hands and knees, you lurch against the wall by the door, hands reaching, gentle, so gentle against the stone. You feel the moon, the sharp gouges of antler, and you sit back on your haunches as the light creeps back in. 

Still there. Still something within. Deeper, deeper now. A story felt, more than told.

You killed them, but you have not lost them.

Hands scrabble against the floor until you find your stones, the right stone. 

There’s an image in your mind, pale against the fog of pain. 

Stone, stone, where is that stone? It was perfect, how it carved the faces in just the right detail and proportion. Only that one will do for this—this!—the last thing you want to remember. All else can go, but this keeps them all alive. It’s what’s left, the remnants of those smiling faces, the flash of green eyes, the shiny black hair.

You smash a stone against the wall and begin to carve. Back and forth, with greater strength than you’ve known since—since—

 

_Once there was a boy, a girl. You could not save them._

 

The lightning bolt takes shape. Crude, but enough to place you in danger of feeling. Of hope. It holds your gaze when the Dementor comes, and you lose more of yourself than you had in your deepest despair. Shadows loom at the corners of your eyes. You move less. You think less. You only stare at the shape that signifies light, intensity, life and death caught in a perverse embrace. It’s the one light they can’t take from you. 

He is what you have now. He lives.

And so do you. 

A silly grin conquers your face. The Dementors cannot wipe it away. You laugh into the void, the echo resounding between your ears, shattering what little is left of your mind. It drowns you in ocean depths, and you almost miss the clap of well-soled shoes against stone, the nasal mutters of disgust. 

So long. So long since the last visit. It might have been yesterday.

His voice shoots pain through your temples. Focus. Think. Think. He knows... things. He knows a story—not the story—but a story all the same. 

He says your name, and you repeat it to yourself, tasting the syllables. But they are too sour, a vileness in the last flavour, and you spit them at the wizard’s feet. He stumbles back a step, only just—too much only, too much just—out of the Dementors’ reach.

There is something under his arm, rolled and white and freckled in black. In words. A word flashes before your eyes. It travels to your tongue with an aching slowness.

“Paper.”

You gesture toward it in case that is not the word, the sound. 

He tosses the thing at you. It rolls across the floor, your spittle blurring a streak through the words, the pictures. 

You do not look up again. The words take time to piece together, their meanings distant ghosts. The picture is easier, safer. Faces, shapes, imagined colours. You touch your fingers to the smiles, the laughter, the waving hands. This is the world now—again. As it was, but without you. As it was, but without them. You frown at the names below. The smoke of familiarity wafts against your senses, then is gone. The next—

 

_—his face twists in fear. Of his choice. Of his fate at your hands. You should have known, you should suspected. It should have been clear since the night he emerged in the shape of a—_

 

The form overtakes you even before you’ve decided. The skin fits closer around you, the matted hair settles naturally against your back. And your mind—the ache is softer, the pressure lighter. For what does a creature need of a mind, of words, of worries? It needs sensation—the slight grit of the stone on his paws, the scent of the wizard’s thick pomade. It needs instinct. 

It needs freedom. 

Why now? 

Some of the human remains. 

Why after all this time?

 

_Once there was a boy_ —a flicker of wand-light on a child’s face— _and you saved him._


End file.
